Doom: The Dark Ages – We’ve Played It!

When I went into my hands-on with Doom: The Dark Ages I was prepared for intense violence and high volume heavy metal, but what I didn’t count on was such an exhilarating amount of demon-killing variety. By the end of my two-hour demo I’d used a saw-toothed shield to slice through demons like it was Beelzebub’s Beyblade, stomped around a war-ravaged city as a colossal Mecha-Slayer, and even brought a snarling Cyberdemon to an explosive end by breathing fire directly down its throat with my faithful dragon steed – which seemed as though it had come to life from one of the sketches I used to draw in the margins of my high school maths books. In fact, every aspect of it looked and felt incredible. It may take place in the dark ages of the Doom timeline, but the Slayer’s latest slaughterfest might well represent the peak of the series’s modern era.

Let’s start with the most crucial new change: the shield. While 2016’s Doom was focussed on run and gun, and 2020’s Doom Eternal evolved into jump and shoot, the core combat principle of Doom: The Dark Ages is to stand and fight. That’s not to say I wasn’t immediately strafing through the strife as I met each new wave of Satan’s soldiers, but the Doom Slayer’s new shield allowed me to hold my ground and block or parry enemy attacks, and even deflect projectiles back at them whenever I managed to nail the timing.

When it comes to which enemy attacks can be deflected and which can’t, it’s basically traffic light rules – red means stop and green means go. Or for Star Wars fans, red is bad and green is good. The point is, you must constantly stay on the move to weave your way through the red waves of enemy fire, but the moment you see a green burst you need to dash towards the danger in order to perfectly bat back everything from searing bolts of energy fired by enemy archers to the deadly volleys launched by the hulking Hell Tanks.

It introduces a welcome new test of your timing and positioning on top of the already high intensity gunplay – which has also been revitalised by an awe-inspiring arsenal that includes a machine gun that crushes skulls and spits out shards of bone and just might be the most heavy metal weapon ever conceived – but the shield isn’t there simply to block and deflect. It can also bare the brunt of a powerful lunging bash that instantly closes the distance between you and your target, and you can even rev up its spinning saw-toothed edge like a chainsaw and hurl it. The shield will pinball through crowds of weaker enemies like the Imps, or it can be lodged straight into the sternums of the beefier Imp Walkers to stun-lock them in place while you mop up the lesser minions around them.

The Slayer’s shield can also work in tandem with your bulging bag of boomsticks in some incredibly satisfying ways. Come up against a platoon of soldiers marching behind seemingly impenetrable steel shields of their own? Just pump a few super shotgun rounds into their metal mobile cover to heat it until it’s visibly molten, before frisbeeing your shield straight at them to ignite the entire group and shower yourself in valuable armour pickups from the resulting explosion.

The Dark Ages’ shield is perhaps the most devastating interpretation of the phrase ‘the best offense is a good defense’, and it makes the new Doom feel like the greatest unofficial Captain America game ever made. Only, instead of fighting an army of Nazis you’re battling the most evil villains that Hell has to offer. Which, I suppose, are both one and the same.

At any rate, no sooner had I settled into The Dark Ages’ sensational new shield-wielding combat system, than I was suddenly whisked into the cockpit of a massive Mecha-Slayer to take on the tallest terrors to ever emerge from a Hell portal. The Atlan assault mechs have only been teased in the past couple of Doom games, but in The Dark Ages they’re finally pilotable, and I was absolutely thrilled to get behind the controls of one of these green-helmed goliaths in order to raise some hell. Or should I say, raze some hell, as I stomped out tiny tanks and crashed through bridges lined with troops on my way to going toe to towering toe with each Titan demon trying to take me down.

Yes, Doom: The Dark Ages takes the series’ signature ultra violence and literally elevates it into Kaiju-sized carnage. Its Atlan combat is simple in setup but seriously satisfying in execution, as you repeatedly pump the right trigger to unleash combos with a pair of school bus-sized fists, with each successful blow you land filling up a special meter consisting of two halves. Fill it halfway and you can deliver a powerful stomp that sends a shockwave through the earth below and opens up cracks of damaging lava that stagger your opponent. Fill it completely and you can deal a devastating finishing move to force Lucifer’s leviathans to go in peace. Or more specifically, in freshly shredded pieces.

If you like your 50-storey-tall fisticuffs with a side order of gargantuan guns then fear not, because midway through the level a whopper of a weapon drop gave my mech access to a machine gun so large it could use an aeroplane hanger for a holster. Performing perfect dodges on incoming enemy attacks powers up both barrels of this not-so-mini-gun, and I was soon blasting gloriously gory chunks of flesh off each Titan’s torso that showered on the soldiers below. You don’t normally see this much raining blood without buying a ticket to a Slayer concert and sticking around for the encore.

Unfortunately I was only given the smallest taste of these supersized shootouts, since my hands-on quickly switched tracks from Godzilla to Game of Thrones as I slipped out of the Atlan’s cockpit and into the saddle of a cybernetic dragon, complete with twin cannons and a pair of dazzling laser wings. Soaring through the skies above a humungous holy city, I took the fight to a series of Hell Carrier airships, again performing perfect dodges to power up my attacks to demolish the artillery along their sides and the deadly assault cannons atop their hulls. With each airship’s defenses down, I was then able to swoop down to its exposed landing zone, leap off my dragon to briefly blast through Hades’ hordes on the flight deck, before shield-bashing into its central power core and forcing the whole thing to erupt like a Hellspawned Hindenburg, as I flew to safety aboard my scaly skybound steed.

Both the Atlan and cyberdragon sections proved to be propulsive palette cleansers rich with spectacle, but I was itchin’ for more of that bitchin’ shield and shoot ’em up action. Thankfully the Slayer was soon brought back down to earth to unleash further terror on terra firma as my hands-on finished with a taste of one of Doom: The Dark Ages’ sprawling sandbox levels. While the previous gameplay stretches were dynamic but somewhat directed action set pieces, this bumper battlefield level dubbed The Siege gave me the freedom to tackle its objectives in any order and progress through it entirely at my own pace.

Thus, in between exhilarating encounters with waves of heavily armoured Mancubuses and shield-based slugfests with super heavy Cyberdemons, I was also able to scour the landscape in all directions for gold to spend on weapon upgrades, collectible toys, and even brand new guns to add to my growing arsenal of demon-destroyers. This included the Reaver Chainshot, which delivered powerful charged up attacks that basically allowed me to fire a cannon ball to instantly mulch a monster, before retracting it on a chain and firing it again to crush their minion mate beside them. Kind of like a Chain Chomp but not nearly as adorable.

The expanded map also provided plenty of nooks and crannies to hunt through for health and armour pickups, including melee ammo for the Slayer’s new flail and electrified gauntlet attacks. That’s right, as if the Slayer wasn’t already badarse enough, he now manually reloads his punches like he’s Henry Cavill in the bathroom brawl scene from Mission: Impossible – Fallout.

The overall impression I got from The Dark Ages’ Siege map is that, although it’s large in size, it’s still dense with breathtaking discoveries and diverse encounters. Some open-field fights locked mini-bosses behind a morale meter, keeping them immune to my attacks until I’d hustled to take out a few dozen of their underlings. Other caves I explored featured almost no combat at all, instead challenging me to use my shield for environmental puzzle-solving, either as a grappling hook to launch me to otherwise unreachable areas or a tool to manipulate the controls of a variety of arcane machines. There were wonderful surprises almost everywhere I looked, but also some not so wonderful ones… like the giant tentacle that suddenly emerged from the ground beneath my feet in a swamp area and turned me from unstoppable beast to recently deceased in an instant.

With that, my time in the Slayer’s combat boots was up, and what a brief but utterly brilliant ride it had been. If this small taste is anything to go by, then I’m pretty sure that the only reason id Software is calling this one Doom: The Dark Ages is because the title of The Ultimate Doom was already taken three decades ago. From its satisfying shield-based combat shake-up and enticing sandbox level structures, to its Pacific Rim-rocking skyscraper-sized beatdowns and its dazzling dragon-riding dogfights, the team behind Doom: The Dark Ages is seemingly throwing everything but Hell’s kitchen sink into making this the biggest and best campaign seen to date in the seminal shooter series.

It’s also set to be the most accessible. If you’ve ever wanted in on the wanton demon destruction but have previously been too intimidated to try, Doom: The Dark Ages looks to have you covered. Not only is there an expanded number of difficulty settings to choose from this time, with six different levels of challenge from the exceedingly gentle Aspiring Slayer to the absolutely mental Ultra Nightmare, but there are also tools to tweak almost every aspect of the experience. That includes sliders to adjust everything from parry timing windows to the damage dealt from each attack, and the overall speed of the action. Whether you want it to be a friction-free power trip or a synapse-straining punishment, Doom: The Dark Ages seems to have the flexibility to allow any level of player to become a god tier Slayer. What’s more, since it’s a prequel to the 2016 reboot, you can go in completely fresh even if you have NFI what a BFG is.

Doom: The Dark Ages is set to arrive on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S on May 15th. Until then, if you want a daily dose of doom, you could just spend a few minutes scrolling through social media. But if you want more Doom: The Dark Ages, be sure to check out our interview with the team at id Software and the gameplay overview trailer.

Tristan Ogilvie is a Senior Video Producer at IGN’s Sydney office. He recently switched from Twitter to Bluesky, but in either case he’s about as talkative as the Doom Slayer.